Past Due

by William Lashner

“That’s it.”

  “What’s it called, the Bloody Swordsman?

  “The Prissy Miss.”

  “You’re kidding. The Prissy Miss?”

  “There you go.”

  “Ooh, sounds ferocious, the Prissy Miss.”

  “Go in and say that, Victor. The regulars will cut your tongue off and stick it up your nose. You’ll be licking snot the rest of your natural-born life.”

  “And Eddie Dean came into the Prissy Miss?”

  “Yes, ’e did.”

  “And hired you?”

  “Yes, ’e did. ’E was looking for specific qualifications and I fit the bill.”

  “Murdering scum, was that it?”

  “That was just the bonus for him, wasn’t it?”

  “He pay you yet.”

  “ ’Alf up front. Them’s the terms.”

  “And you expect to get the rest with him busted flat?”

  “That’s where you come in.”

  “I see. Okay, go ahead. What does he want?”

  He finished his first pint before he said, “These are the terms. He wants what it is you took up there in Massachusetts.”

  “I don’t have everything he thinks I have. There was—”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, shut up already. We’re not a debating society, understand? I’m not ’ere for excuses, just to give the terms. ’E wants all of it. It’s up to you make sure all of it’s there. But that’s not the all of it. ’E also wants the suitcase.”

  “I never said I had that.”

  “But you know where it is, don’t you?”

  I pressed my lips together and said nothing.

  “And ’e wants the sot that betrayed ’im twenty years ago. ’E wants the name.”

  “I can’t do all this.”

  “And ’e wants it tomorrow.”

  “He’s crazy.”

  “You’ve noticed that too, ’ave you? Well, them’s the terms, Victor. It’s all about terms. And them terms are nonnegotiable.”

  “Does he want me to bring it all to the house?”

  “No, after your visit last night ’e thought it prudent to move on out. Just bring it to me ’ere. Tomorrow, same time as this. But be certain, no police, no tails, just the materials. Them’s the terms, and the terms is rock solid.”

  “I bring what he wants, then what happens?”

  “When I get them and get away without any problem,” he said, climbing off his stool, “your partner walks away with nothing but a story to tell ’er kids on long winter nights and we sail off into the sunrise.”

  He reached for his second pint, drained it, wiped the foam off his lip with his sleeve.

  “Now be a good little servant boy and take care of this tab, won’t you, Victor?”

  “You didn’t like that crack, I suppose.”

  “Fancy this, Vic, it didn’t bother me none at all. See, I don’t take it personally.”

  I didn’t respond. He didn’t care. He put his hands in the bulging pockets of his long black leather jacket, turned around, and headed out of the bar.

  By the time I paid for the bill and left the bar, he was nowhere to be seen. I spun around in frustration on the street and as I spun my stomach fell with fear. What the hell did I expect? I went into Eddie Dean’s house, let him know what I knew, let him know I was going to take him down. How could I not have expected the bastard to fight back? If I had talked it over with Beth first, she would have stopped me, she would have applied her cool calculation and found a better path. But now those paths were closed to me. Beth. Beth. What to do about Beth? It was too late to count on Telushkin and his FBI to handle it. Colfax had stated the terms with utter clarity, unless I could come up with a better plan I would have to come through. Somehow I would have to get that bastard what he wanted. And I knew how to start.

  I took the yellow sheet out of my pocket, the one Dante’s boy had given me, called the number written there. It rang for a moment, and then came the voice, a woman’s voice, secretarial, the one with the high gray hair.

  “Pennsylvania Supreme Court,” she said. “Justice Straczynski’s chambers. How can I help you?”

  Chapter

  64

  HE WALKED UP the path with a slow, awkward gait, his head swiveling guiltily, his blue suit bunched around his hunched shoulders. It was Rittenhouse Square in the middle of a fine spring afternoon and the park was lousy with pretty girls and slackers and office workers taking in some sun and shoppers with their bags, resting before another bout of rabid acquisition. It was crowded, loud, urban—a perfect place for an anonymous meeting. Across the park, on the southwest corner, stood Eddie Dean’s rented and now-deserted mansion, a touch that gave me a nice ironic jolt even if as yet it meant nothing to the man in the suit cautiously making his way to my bench. When the man spotted me, his head recoiled as if from some stark fulsome scent. I seem to get that a lot, but not often from a Supreme Court justice.

  “Well?” he said, standing before me.

  He was bent forward, his high forehead glistening with sweat, his thin blond hair disheveled, his fists balled with anxiety. I was leaning back on the bench, my arms spread leisurely on either side.

  “Sit,” I said.

  “I don’t have much time.”

  “Yes, you do,” I said. “You have all day. Sit.”

  He sat at my command like a lapdog.

  The hardest thing was getting him on the line. When I gave my name to the secretary she patched me right through to the vigilant and violent Clerk Lobban. No, said Curtis Lobban, the justice was not available. Why don’t you tell me, said Curtis Lobban, the purpose of the call? Of course, said Curtis Lobban, whatever you say I will relay to the justice word for word. No, said Curtis Lobban, it is not possible for you to speak to him right now. There was again an ominous note in his voice that raised the hair on the back of my neck. This was not simply a gatekeeper, this Curtis Lobban, shuffling files and appointments, beating up trespassers, doing the bidding of a sitting jurist, this was something else, something fearsomely protective. I wasn’t getting through, he wasn’t letting me through, and I didn’t quite know what to do until a voice broke into our conversation.

  “I will speak to Mr. Carl,” said the justice, harshly.

  “Yes, sir,” said Curtis Lobban.

  “We need to meet,” I said.

  “When,” said the justice.

  “Now.”

  “That is impossible,” said Curtis Lobban, still on the line. “There are appointments.”

  “Hang up the phone, Curtis,” said the justice, “and cancel my appointments.”

  And now here he was, Jackson Straczynski, standing before me, fidgeting and wincing as if preparing to be beaten about the head. And now sitting down next to me, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, wringing his long pale hands as if he were auditioning for a role.

  “I want to apologize, Mr. Carl,” he said, speaking as if it were a struggle to get the words out. “After your last visit, I made the inquiries I told you I would make. Everything you said turned out to be true, and I am appalled.”

  “But of course you knew.”

  “No.”

  “About my being locked up at Traffic Court? About Rashard Porter.”

  “No, I did not.”

  “It was your doing. It had to be.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “Then who could—”

  I stopped in midsentence and thought it through. The secretive Clerk O’Brien in Traffic Court. The dour Clerk Templeton in Common Pleas Court. The fearsomely protective Clerk Lobban in the justice’s own chambers.

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “I fear,” said the justice, “that one of my employees might have acted to safeguard my position well beyond his actual authority.”

  “A conspiracy of clerks.”

  “Clerk Lobban’s loyalties run very deep, deeper than in a normal employee-employer relationship. He knows my wife, in fact it is she who hired him for me. His wife
is ill and my wife helps in her care. It is very complicated.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “No,” he said. “No, you can’t.”

  “What kind of car does your clerk drive?”

  “Something small, I think. Foreign.”

  “Toyota?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Color?”

  “I don’t know. Look, I have spoken to Judge Wellman. He denied any pressure was brought to bear, but I have reason to believe a motion to vacate Mr. Porter’s sentence would be well received.”

  “What about Lonnie?”

  “I read about Mr. Chambers in the newspaper. Very distressing, and I know what you must think. But I never told Curtis anything about him. Our prior conversation remained absolutely private.”

  “And Joey Parma?”

  “Who?”

  “Joseph Parma. He called you a number of times.”

  “No. You must be mistaken. I never heard of Joseph Parma.”

  “He was a friend of your brother’s.”

  “Benny?”

  “Yes. An old friend.”

  “Benny did have a friend named Joey when he was younger. They were altar boys together. I think they called him Joey Cheaps.”

  “Bingo.”

  “But why was he trying to call me?”

  “Because Joey was an idiot. And he had done something twenty years ago for your brother. And he thought he could turn what he did twenty years ago into cash today.”

  “And that was the client you were referring to, who had his throat slit.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Mr. Carl. Oh God. Mr. Carl. I think I am going to be sick.”

  Chapter

  65

  “IF IT HAD been anyone else but Tommy,” said Jackson Straczynski, still leaning forward on the bench, his stomach still riled, “I might have handled it differently. That’s not an excuse. I have no excuse. But it may be an explanation. Have you ever had a friend to whom you feel very close and yet with whom you can’t help but compete over every available scrap? That was the way it was with me and Tommy Greeley.

  “I met him on the fencing team. I had thought fencing might be something interesting to learn, a good aristocratic sport. Yes, that was how I thought about things then, anything to wipe the South Philly out of me. Which is funny, when you think of it, because all the while I was working on my parries and feints and lunges with the purpose of rising in class, my younger brother, Benjamin, was building an entirely different reputation with a blade of his own. Tommy was new to the sport too, but from the first he dominated me on the piste, forcing me to break ground, scoring off me at will. And his smile, that little victorious smirk when he ripped off his mask, would eat like an acid at my bones.

  “There were other arenas to compete in, of course, grades and girls being the most prominent. I studied more than Tommy and yet he was so damn quick his grades were the equal of mine, and with his smile and charm he got the best of the girls too. It wasn’t long before every time I saw him smile I wanted to choke a goat. And yet, through circumstance and familiarity, we remained as friends. Maybe I wanted to keep him close as a sort of mirror. I knew I would be succeeding if I could best Tommy Greeley.

  “My dream was to go to law school. Fair enough. Clarence Darrow, Thurgood Marshall, all the great liberal lawyers were my guides. I was still young, things have changed, but that was the dream. So I worked hard, kept my grades up. Tommy had no real dream, as I recall, except to get high and get laid, the great twining goals of our generation. Tommy was, undoubtedly, having more fun than I, but I could console myself with my future. That’s where I would prevail over Tommy Greeley. It was one of the greatest days of my life when I got into Penn Law. It was also one of the most bitter, because an hour later I heard that Tommy Greeley had also been accepted.

  “It was in law school that his little side business took off, that the marihuana he was selling for a nice profit turned into cocaine, which he was selling for an absurdly huge profit. He drove around campus in his sports car, he threw parties, found himself a series of gorgeous girlfriends, and all the while, through sheer brilliance, he kept his grades up. It would have killed me with jealousy, it would have devoured me, except I had found something else by then. I had found my wife.

  “Love, sex, beauty, art, purpose. For me she was the repository of all that in my life. I suppose, Mr. Carl, therein lay the problem.

  “Our first years together were an idyll, truly, a sweet and dreamy time of absorption in each other. It was all about devotion, communication, art. It was all about the journals. That was our evening activity, after I finished my law studies. We would sit together, at the kitchen table, translating our emotions, our experiences, our love into words so that we could make them hard and real and forever. She had been keeping journals since she was a child, they became a part of her, a necessary organ, like a lung, in which to breathe in her life. For her, nothing was real without them. And together, with our writing and our intimacy and our love, we created art. Love as art, Mr. Carl. Never was a drug so potent.

  “Without it ever being stated, our roles in the relationship were agreed upon. I would be the lawyer, I would financially support us. And my wife Alura, she would be the artist. She was a dancer when I met her, but she wanted to explore other fields, every field, she wanted her whole life to be a work of art. She believed no endeavor could be more noble, and I agreed. Yes. I agreed. Together we would play these disparate parts in our singular endeavor. And so, slowly, I spent less time with the journals, more time at the law. She immersed herself in her art, I immersed myself in legal theory. And we were happy.

  “Until that man with the beard and the motorcycle vest. He came to me, almost deranged, spouting off about how some bastard was sleeping with his wife, and that he was sleeping with my wife too. I couldn’t believe it, I didn’t believe it. Until he said that the bastard was Tommy Greeley. Tommy was a pig, I could believe anything of him. And Alura had been growing distant, things between us were changing. So I did something I had never done before, and have never done since, I staked out her studio and waited. And waited. And waited.

  “And then I saw. Him. My mirror. Opening the door of my wife’s building. Climbing the stairs to my wife’s studio. Through the window I saw him reaching out his arms and embracing my wife’s body. The pain I felt was so physical it felled me, it actually threw me to my knees. And behind my closed lids I could see his little victorious smirk, and I retched, right there on the sidewalk.”

  “What did you do about it?”

  “I did the worst thing I could possibly think of doing. I told my little brother.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Just what I heard, what I saw. I didn’t tell him to do anything, but I told him, and I knew what he was. So when Tommy Greeley came up missing, I had little doubt what had happened.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Isn’t that bad enough?”

  “You didn’t tell him where, when, what he’d be carrying?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There has to be more.”

  “I told my brother. My brother was a drug-crazed maniac. Tommy disappeared. What more is there? Later, in a panic, I went to him. I asked him if he had anything to do with Tommy’s disappearance. And what he said, Benny, what he said was ‘Don’t worry about it. You just keep hitting them books.’ He was always so protective, so proud, my little brother, and that’s what he said. And he winked. And I knew.

  “And what was it all for? Tommy Greeley was just the first. I confronted my wife about it. In her studio, and she was unapologetic, defiant even. ‘What do you know of art?’ she said. She accused me of giving up art for mammon. ‘You made your choice, fine, but don’t come in here and judge what I must do to fulfill my artistic destiny.’ My wife was exploring the depths of her sexuality, the depths of what it meant to be a woman. And she told me it would continue and it was none of my business. That
was the last time I ever entered her studio.”

  “So why do you stay with her?”

  “Love, sex, beauty, art, purpose. Whatever she was, whatever she has become, she is a part of me I am unable to deny, the better part of me, Mr. Carl. I had aspirations to be an artist myself. Now I have Alura. I can’t bear even the thought of losing her.”

  “And what about the baby she was carrying?”

  “You know? How?”

  “I can see your wife in her.”

  “She’s quite beautiful, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, Kimberly is.”

  “I meant Alura.”

  “Okay.”

  “We couldn’t keep it. She didn’t want it. Whatever she is, Alura is not maternal. And how could I bear to raise this symbol of betrayal in my own house, to see her smile every day, the same smile of the man who humiliated me at every turn. When Alura came to me it was too late for an abortion. She had the child, we put it up for adoption, that was the end.”

  “But it wasn’t the end, was it?”

  “I couldn’t leave it at that. I felt responsible for her. I helped support the family, I was able to arrange her acceptance into Penn, I paid her tuition. It was hard on a government salary to support Alura and the baby both, but I felt I owed that, at least, to the child of my wife and the man for whose death I was responsible.”

  There was sincerity to what the justice had just told me that I found striking, an utter honesty, and part of it was that his story made him out to be about the biggest weenie on the planet. I mean, here he was, tolerating a wife who felt totally free to sleep around and humiliate her husband all in the name of art. And at the first sign of trouble, instead of dealing with his wife himself, he went running to his little brother, the same little brother that had undoubtedly protected his big brother’s butt in the schoolyard. Yes, if a statement against one’s penal interest is considered reliable by the courts, what about a statement like the one the justice had just given me, which you could say was baldly against his penile interest. But it wasn’t just that which convinced me he was telling the truth. His story meshed perfectly with everything else I had learned, and it pointed perfectly at the person who had truly set up Tommy Greeley for his brutal encounter at the river’s edge.